YouBetMe will turn you into a bookie before the Superbowl

Keeping track of all your casual bets while watching sports can be a pain in the ass, and handshakes don’t exactly guarantee your friends will pay up.

New mobile betting startup YouBetMe thinks there’s plenty of room for improvement and thus is launching its service ahead of Sunday’s Superbowl game.

The service, which we first saw way back at DEMO 2012, is basically a middle ground between shaking hands and going to a professional bookie that can give you odds and whatnot. Yet the app doesn’t handle any monetary transactions — that still happens directly between betters.

“We think there’s a lot of potential in the storytelling of betting,” said YouBetMe founder and CEO Jason Neubauer in an interview with VentureBeat.

YouBetMe’s iOS app has three different options for making bets. The first two options are tailored for sports fans. You can either pick from a list of available games being played that day, which have some odds and statistics, so you can at least make informed decisions. The second option is a “prediction” that lets you bet on things that might happen in a game in the near future. There’s a huge list of quick options, including stuff you might bet on while actually playing a game. The third option is a custom bet, which doesn’t have to be related to sports at all. You pick an opponent, set the terms of the bet, the time, locations, etc.

Neubauer said the startup plans to make money through sponsorship deals that would offer its users perks when using YouBetMe’s app.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised $1.2 million in seed funding and is seeking to raise a series A in the near future. Check out the demo video below for a closer look at YouBetMe’s app.